Maverick filmmaker Orson Welles’ words linger on more than a quarter century after his death, which may or may not be a good thing depending on who is listening.

Two new books based on recorded conversations paint contrasting portraits of the cinematic titan, who at the age of 26 directed, starred, produced and co-wrote “Citizen Kane” – and battled Hollywood in the 44 years that followed.

“Orson Welles and Roger Hill: A Friendship in Three Acts” is based on recorded telephone calls between Welles and Hill, his former headmaster. The lifelong friends agreed to record their calls for use in planned books. The conversations, edited by Hill’s grandson, former Springfield resident Todd Tarbox, capture Welles’ warmer, thoughtful side.

In contrast, three years of recorded lunchtime chats between Welles and fellow director Henry Jaglom are the basis of “My Lunches with Orson,” a sometimes unflattering portrait of the movie great. The book has reignited debate among Wellesphiles, including his closest associates, who maintain that the unvarnished, often bitchy, conversations were recorded without Welles’ knowledge – something Jaglom flatly denies.

“Those ‘friends’ of Orson’s don’t know what they are talking about,” Jaglom said. “But I can understand why they think so. The tapes were Orson’s idea, not mine.”

Jaglom recalled a conversation in the early 1980s when Welles asked him to tape their lunchtime chats for use in a planned autobiography. Welles, he says, asked the device be hidden in Jaglom’s bag so he would not be preoccupied with being recorded.

“Only once in the five years after that did he ask about it. After telling me something about his childhood – I don’t remember what – he said, ‘Is that thing working,?’ and pointed at my bag. And I assured him that it was. That is on the tapes.”

Former American Film magazine editor-in-chief Peter Biskind, (“Easy Riders, Raging Bulls”) edited the transcribed tapes for publication. While he found no evidence of Welles referring to the lunchtime recordings, he does not doubt Jaglom’s account.

Orson Welles, left, and Henry Jaglom in 1985

“Welles was no dummy, to say the least, and it’s very hard to imagine that he was taped surreptitiously over a three-year period without his being aware of it,” Biskind said. “That scenario defies credibility.”

The recordings, transcribed by Eugene Corey – who Biskind feels deserves a medal of valor for poring over 30 to 40 hours of muffled, terrible-sounding tapes – reveal the “real” Welles, Biskind said.

“Most of the Welles books, even the ones that attack him, treat him like an icon. There are plenty of good interviews with him, but often they’re by starry eyed journalists to whom he is the ‘great director of “Citizen Kane.”‘ They are respectful to a fault, but it was a role he loved to play to the hilt, and they don’t give even a glimpse of what he was really like,” Biskind said.

He added, “What’s different about the Welles that appears in this book is that with Henry he was relaxed, and felt free to gossip, complain, tell stories on his friends and acquaintances, and be extreme politically incorrect when he felt like it. He gives candid, often cranky assessments of filmmakers and actors he knew and those he didn’t. He reveals his human side, if you will. He does speak of his films, but he also lets his hair down and more or less expresses what he thinks, although with him you never knew because, as Henry has observed, he is a man of many masks.”

The conversations delve into his career and include warm observations about longtime pal Joseph Cotten and others, but also show Welles deriding contemporaries like Richard Burton, John Houseman and one of his closest friends, Peter Bogdanovich. There are bigoted remarks about the Irish and comments and some may view as homophobic, even though Welles professed a love of Ireland and had gay acquaintances.

Despite those moments on the recordings, Biskind said he “fell in love” with Welles through the lunchtime chats.

“I was surprised by the breadth of his knowledge and his enormous intelligence. He wanders over many, many subjects in these conversations, not only films and filmmaking, but politics, religion, as well as the other arts: classical music, theater, literature, painting, and so on. And he has informed opinions about everything – even where his opinions are a little nutty. When challenged, he makes fascinating arguments to support them.”

Peter Biskind

Welles, a lifelong liberal, frequently talks politics, including his hatred of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and contempt for those who named names during the witchhunts of the McCarthy era.

Welles shows no mercy in shredding an HBO executive during a lunchtime pitch. However he warmly recalls humoring a fan who mistook him for Milton Berle.

For Welles’ film fans, the highlights of the book are when Welles shares insight into the fate of two of his unfilmed projects “The Big Brass Ring” and “The Cradle Will Rock.”

In the former, he considers several potential stars, rejecting Robert De Niro, who he felt was too ethnic for the part of a presidential candidate. In planning “The Cradle Will Rock,” Welles is furious that “Animal House” director John Landis, who would have been a producer of the film, was advising him on filmmaking.

“These conversations, in giving us a peek into the struggles that shadowed his later years – financial issues, his failure to launch new projects, finish old ones, deal with the 800-pound gorilla in the room, which was the reputation he had for walking away from films before they were finished that prevented him from getting backing for his scripts – give the lie to the idea that he was indolent or irresponsible, Biskind said. “He died, after all, with a typewriter on his lap, writing a script. He kept fighting to the end. To see a talent like his, a man with his gifts, brought low by some malign combination of circumstance and personal failings is just heartbreaking. What a waste.”

Jaglom agrees.

“It is true that he might have sabotaged himself in certain ways by his need for absolute perfectionism, by his need to do things exactly as he wanted, but no one would criticize an artist in any other art form for this. Only in films are you supposed to ‘compromise.’ In music or painting or a novel or a play, no one would criticize the artist for not wanting to compromise and to insist on having things creatively his or her own way. But Orson worked and worked hard till the day he died,” Jaglom said.

Roger Hill and Orson Welles in 1978Todd Tarbox collection

The unfinished film projects and struggles are also touched upon in “Orson Welles and Roger Hill: A Friendship in Three Acts.” The friendship between Welles and the former headmaster at the Woodstock, Ill., school he attended endured for nearly 60 years.

Tarbox’s play provides a gentler portrait of Welles. It has earned accolades from respected Welles’ authors like Bogdanovich, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Simon Callow and Joseph McBride.

Welles appears unguarded as he shares thoughts and feelings about his career and personal life with his mentor and friend.

“From the day Orson entered the Todd Seminary for Boys in Woodstock, Illinois on Sept. 15, 1926, until the day he died on Oct. 15, 1985, he and Roger Hill had a lifelong bond founded on numerous mutual interests and enthusiasm that quickly developed into, life-sustaining unconditional love,” said Tarbox, who lived in the Forest Park section of Springfield in the 1970s.

Todd Tarbox

Hill not only nurtured Welles’ artistic side during his formative years, but he was a father figure following the death of Welles’ parents.

Some of the conversations touch upon Welles’ three marriages, including the union with Rita Hayworth. Welles talks about his three daughters. He was by all accounts a distant father, but comes across in Tarbox’s play as still very much concerned about their happiness.

Most clear is the impact the headmaster at an Illinois school had on one of the greatest stars of radio, theater and film.

“Without my grandfather in Orson’s life, there’s little doubt that his professional life would have been rich in creative accomplishment in any number of fields,” Tarbox said. “However, had Roger Hill never crossed Orson’s path, and not played an integral role in his life, no doubt Orson’s real existence would have been greatly diminished."